Counter-Archive

Tucked away in a garden on the edge of Paris is a multimedia archive like no other: Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (1908-1931). Kahn's vast photo-cinematographic experiment preserved world memory through the privileged lens of everyday life, and Counter-Archive situates this project in its biographic, intellectual, and cinematic contexts. Tracing the archive's key influences, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson, the geographer Jean Brunhes, and the biologist Jean Comandon, Paula Amad maps an alternative landscape of French cultural modernity in which vitalist philosophy cross-pollinated with early film theory, documentary film with the avant-garde, cinematic models of temporality with the early Annales school of history, and film's appropriation of the planet with human geography and colonial ideology. At the heart of the book is an insightful meditation upon the transformed concept of the archive in the age of cinema and an innovative argument about film's counter-archival challenge to history. The first comprehensive study of Kahn's films, Counter-Archive also offers a vital historical perspective on debates involving archives, media, and memory.

Counter-Archive is a groundbreaking, original and scholarly book, which is indispensable to a full understanding of the early and present history of the cinema and its relationship to the archive and the everyday. Barbara Creed, H-France

an ambitious and compelling book which elegantly ties meticulous archival detail to astute theoretical challenges, and its conceptual hook may well inspire further critical attention. Tara Blake Wilson, New Formations

A work of exceptional scholarly merit. Jan Baetens, Biography

...rich and endearing study... Lisabeth During and Deborah Levitt, Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. World Souvenir: "Mr. K" and the Archives de la Planète2. "Keep your eyes open": From Pre-documentary to Documentary Film in the Kahn Archive3. The Counter-Archive of Cinematic Memory: Bergsonism, la durée, and the Everyday4. "No more written archives, only films": Early Discourses and Practices of the Film Archive5. The "anecdotal side of history": Temporality, Film, and Annales Historiography6. Seeing "for the first time": The Rediscovery of the Everyday in Early French Film Theory7. Illuminations from the Darkened "Sanctuary": Reception of the Kahn Films8. The Aerial View: Human Geography, Cosmopolitanism, and ColonialismConclusion: Toute la Mémoire du monde: The Counter-Archive Beyond KahnAppendix: Photographers and Cameramen of the Archives de la PlanèteNotesBibliographyIndex

About the Author

Paula Amad is an Australian-born Lebanese academic and Associate Professor of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. She has taught at universities in Australia, France, and the United States and is the recipient of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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